 So today, I'm such a geek, but I love the subject we're talking about. The digital classroom and how it's reinventing the way we're learning. Anant Argawal is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. A real dummy. And the CEO of the innovative online learning destination, edX. Anant, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, my pleasure, thank you. Nice to see you. So I know that you partnered with Harvard and MIT to create edX, and it offers interactive online classes from top schools. Can you explain how it works exactly? edX.org is a online destination. So learners can go to that destination, and they can take these great free courses from some of the best universities in the world, like MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Georgetown, or Tsinghua from China, for that matter. Our university partners create these online courses and offer them on the edX platform, and people can come and take these for free from some of the best universities in the world. Which is fantastic, the key two words being for free. And college has gotten so prohibitively expensive for many people, and all these students are saddled with student loan debt. This is a very appealing way to either focus solely for your education, or, as the Khan Academy does, augment the education you may be receiving in a more traditional way. Absolutely, I think for the first time we are consistently applying technology to education. And we have to apply technology to everything else, to sports, to communications, to healthcare. For the first time, we are applying it to something that's so important, in education of absolute fundamental human right. We're now applying it to education. And when people have applied technology to any field, whether it's communications or healthcare, many good things happen. First of all, it becomes widely accessible. Second, there are opportunities to make it much, much higher quality, whether on campus or worldwide. And finally, I think there are opportunities to make the whole system and the quality such that it's more efficient, so that more students graduate. And maybe we can also reduce cost, but I think these are experiments that we are performing to see where we can take this. Plus, as the world gets flatter and flatter, global cultural literacy is becoming increasingly important. So, as you said, from every country in the world. So, these people are from all over. I mean, I would imagine they really range in age and in socioeconomic background. I mean, what kinds of people are taking these courses? Because I'd like to take one, actually. Oh, you should. It is absolutely mind-boggling. We have learners who are eight years old to 92 years old taking our courses. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. My favorite is Kushbakt. Kushbakt is a student in Peshawar in Pakistan. So, she was married early. And so, because of that, she could not complete her schooling. She just finished ninth grade. And now, in Peshawar, she writes to us saying that she's taking edX courses. She took Michael Sandel's HarvardX justice course. And she says her husband is very supportive. So, she's at home and she's a mother at home. And she's taking online courses. And with a very supportive husband in Pakistan, you know, here's a woman who can now get educated when they could not continue their education at home. That's fantastic. Well, you think about, and you think about the kind of social change that can be ushered in just with an education and some of the positive things that can be done in many of these countries as a result of these educational opportunities. Meanwhile, I know that there has been a lot of discussion about online education, not all of it positive. It has a bad retention rate. A lot of people sign up and they don't complete the course. And now, there's more and more discussion about having the lecture show up online, but the actual class discussion take place with real face-to-face connection. So, I guess, online courses are not necessarily a panacea or a replacement for more traditional learning. Oh, of course, we've always believed that online learning is useful not just for students who want to learn online when they did not have access to an education in many parts of the world. At the same time, we can bring the technologies, bring the learning back to campus and improve campus education at the same time. And we bring all the social into the classroom. And rather than telling them, shut off your iPad, leave it outside. I said, no, bring it in. It should be part of the teaching experience. So on our platform, we have a discussion forum where, as they watch videos, students are discussing the content of the class with peers. So you can see a discussion with a student from Colombia, a learner from Pakistan, the US, India. Can you imagine the world 10 years from now when these kids who have been discussing things with people from Syria, or Pakistan, or Sudan, or the USA? And 10 years from now, they've learned together about the world's going to be a different place. It's really extraordinary. Meanwhile, you can get a certificate, not a degree, from an online course. But I understand these certificates, in some cases, are treated pretty seriously by potential employers. Absolutely. Many of them are using them on the LinkedIn profile. They're showing them to employers. We have examples from a student in India working with a partner aspiring minds in India that got a job based on a software-as-a-service course from Berkeley that they took on edX. So there's many examples of this now. Wow. And I know that Sal was one of your students at MIT. But when it came time for you to really kind of start pursuing online education in a more serious way, you reached out to Sal, and he became the teacher. So yeah, I love the way Sal Khan does videos. And so I've given them a name. I call them KSVs or Khan-style videos. And so I did my circuits course. In some sense, I was a professor, but he learned me good. And so I did my videos in the KSV style. And I liked them so much that on edX, we were creating a course called edX 101, which is a course for teachers on how to create online courses. The first thing I did was reached out to our friend Sal and said, hey, Sal, can you create for me a Khan-style video on how to create a Khan-style video? And he did. What will he think of next? Well, I think it's very exciting what both of you are doing and really game-changing, I think, all over the world in terms of education and so many things that result from a good education. So Anant, thank you so much. And Sal, again, thanks to you. And to find out more about edX and the Khan Academy, you can go to our website at katiecurrick.com. We'll be right back.